HEAVYHEART

In my art practice and ongoing thesis, my main focus has been the investigation of chaos versus the calm, violence versus celebration, and where the lines blur between the two.

HEAVYHEART revolves around images of riot and celebration culture and violence around the globe, starting from my native country of Turkey and its 2013 Gezi riots as well as the 2018 anti-terrorist operation at the Syrian-Turkish border. By using news footage and photography, then compositing the images to create a new landscape I find that I can visually depict exactly what I want to say.

After expanding my research to places such as France, USA, and Zimbabwe, I saw how the identity of the countries and the people started getting lost in the images. In the absence of flags, all my paintings appeared to depict any riot, any celebration, anywhere.

One of the aesthetic goals of HEAVYHEART is the translation of how we are given information. News articles and videos are turned into combined digital paintings —which, as a concept, is unorthodox and outside the bounds of traditional definitions of “painting”— then printed to bring digital 2D to life as a 3D object to present very real, grounded concepts which are often presented to us in media in such a dissociative romantic way. We need talk about the issues of the world in grounded, physical methods and face what they say about the core of human experience and community.

HEAVYHEART gives the audience a chance to realize the verisimilitude between the issues we deem as different around the globe and ground them in reality, and how at the core of them we face the same images, feel the same emotions, and desire the same peace.